"Hello? Hello? Yes, Madam?" came the response over a crackly phone line to Lagos. I had telephoned my friend C., a retired army captain, who promised to meet me at the airport if I ever went back to Lagos and warmly extended 'compliments of the season'. It reminded me to look through my notebooks from my last visit to Lagos, where I had scribbled some phrases as C. entertained me with stories of his life in the Nigerian army.

'Operation Nightwatch,' I have written. 'For fear of the unknown.'
'In the trenches there is no bed, no air-conditioning. You have water, you sip and put back, sip and put back,' (here I remember him knees bent, half-crouched, motioning taking his hip flask of water from his belt and putting is back as quickly as possible for 'fear of unknown').
'Magistrate has no eyes in back of head.'

Reading these garbled notes, I was reminded of an incident at the airport. C. was taking me through the security scanner to the area where the baggage carousels whirred under the weight of Nigerian suitcases. I was not meant to be in there, but he managed to wangle it for me. I had not seen him go off to the scanner, and was left leaning exhausted on the Bureau de Change counter.

"This woman is with me," he told the security agent, pointing with a thumb to the empty space behind him. "Please let her through."

We laughed about that for days.

C's response to everything is, "Because I am an army officer." He fought in the Nigerian civil war (of 1967), and although now retired, maintains Operation Nightwatch in his alert stance and reluctance to sleep. Once I left him dozing on a sofa and went off to the airport, only to find him already there, waiting for me ("You are late!"). He comes across as serious, sharp, his pressed shirts rigid with starch, the buckle of his belt gleaming. His eyes have hollowed in their years, and seem shadowed. But he knows how to laugh better than anyone else, and would do anything for anyone he deemed worthy, never accepting a penny in return.